


The Perfect Heart

by TheSwingbyJeanHonoreFragonard



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Body Horror, Body Modification, Cyberpunk, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Mild Gore, Past Relationship(s), Science Fiction, Sky Pirates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-01 13:51:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18801628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSwingbyJeanHonoreFragonard/pseuds/TheSwingbyJeanHonoreFragonard
Summary: What better way to welcome back your felon captain than taking him out on the heist of a lifetime?





	The Perfect Heart

Look at a city through unaugmented eyes and all you’ll see are buildings crammed full of people and stacked on top of each other like a child’s wood blocks. Depending on the neighborhood, you’ll see some artificial trees pumping recycled oxygen and a mild, earthy scent into the air. If you’re lucky to live high enough up, perhaps the trees will be real. Down in the slums, though, beneath the oppressive boot of the mega-corporations and their private militaries, there aren’t any trees. There are plenty of knives, though. And guns. And maybe a few species of government biology experiments running around. Who knows. It’s a goddamn circus down there.

 

Get you a good, top-of-the-line optical implant or, hell, something bought off the black market, and the city will look totally different. Not just because you can zoom in and snap pictures just by blinking and waving a hand. Get someone good to hack the implant so that it’s equipped with thermal radars, radio scanners and military-grade magnetic trackers and, even in the middle of the day, the city will light up neon green in front of your eyes.

 

That’s how Taeyong saw the world.

 

A tangled web of connections. Layer under layer of electronic pulses. Streams of data exploding apart and then piecing themselves back together as they were transmitted through the cloud. He could see every white-hot path of electricity, every foggy tidal wave of a net signal, every comm call. Flash drives looked like glow sticks from a rave. If he squinted and adjusted his settings, he could read text messages, too. Even if he couldn’t see the phone screen.

 

What he didn’t need his illegal supercomputer eyeball to see, however, was that the ship he was piloting was far too wide to land on any of the narrow roofs out here. “It’s too big to fit, Captain,” he remarked.

 

“Oohh,” Captain Johnny sang out. He propped an elbow up on the back of Taeyong’s chair. “That’s what you said last night, remember?”

 

Without taking his left hand off of the ship throttle or his eyes off the windshield, Taeyong swung his right fist backwards and smirked with satisfaction as it connected with the ship captain’s groin.

 

“Fuck,” Johnny screamed.

 

Taeyong threatened him by holding up his fist again.

 

Johnny backed away hastily and then doubled over, clutching his dick. “I need both of my balls, goddammit.”

 

Taeyong didn’t miss a beat. “And I need a place to park the ship.”

 

One hand on his crotch, Johnny limped forwards until he could peer over the dashboard and out of the ship’s front windshield.

 

It was the middle of the night. The city below was nothing but one glowing lump of neon and steel. The rapid river of flying traffic below them looked like little more than a swarm of fireflies. They were quite high up, Johnny noticed. Too high up to be in anyone else’s way but also too high up to properly _see_. “How can you even tell? You don’t have any camera apps open.”

 

Taeyong looked away from the ship controls to stare up at his captain. “I made a few… adjustments.” He pointed to his left eyeball. The motion command popped open his settings menu which made his iris glow a bright, digital blue.

 

Johnny stepped back. “I’ll be damned. Thought you were against augmentation? Thought it conflicted with your religion?”

 

“I am,” Taeyong looked back at the ship controls. He waved his hand near his eye a second time to close the menu. “And it does. But without you, we had to make due.”

 

“Right,” Johnny mumbled. Being a pirate wasn’t exactly the safest or the most secure or legal of professions. He’d spent the past four years serving a sentence in max-security, taking the fall and leaving his whole crew behind. “How did you guys make due?”

 

“Yukhei and Sicheng got into scamming. I mean, big-time scamming. Stealing hundreds of thousands… sometimes millions from unsuspecting corporate heads too rich to notice the dip in their accounts. Mark left. I mean _left_ left. The day after you lost your trial, he just dipped. We haven’t seen hide nor tail of him in years. Jungwoo went to school. Well… back to school. He’s an _actual_ medic now. We also picked up a stray. I don’t know what he’s into. Drag, I think? I can’t even recall his name.”

 

Johnny ran a hand over his face. He should have asked the question he actually wanted an answer to. “How did _you_ make due while I was gone?”

 

One of the gauges on Taeyong’s dashboard flashed red with a warning. He flipped a switch, opened up some kind of instrument panel and fiddled with a few knobs, making minute adjustments to tank pressure and fuel flow. In a handful of seconds, the gauge stopped flashing as heat levels evened out. He slammed the instrument panel shut. “Sold crab rangoons,” Taeyong stated flatly.

 

Johnny almost forgot what he’d even asked the man. “You’re kidding.”

 

“Very good crab rangoons, might I add.”

 

Johnny couldn’t tell if Taeyong was joking or not. It had been four years since he’d seen the man. His sense of humor could have changed just as drastically as his appearance had.

 

“At least the ship is the same, right,” Johnny asked, forcing a laugh to keep the mood light. “Everything where you remember it?”

 

“I suppose,” Taeyong mumbled. “It sat in Jungwoo’s hangar for three and a half years. Took me a full month to run diagnostics and get the right parts in her, even with my new eye.”

 

“Work you can handle.”

 

“Work I almost didn’t do until Jungwoo paid me.” His attention wandered to the ship’s navigation controls.

 

“Getting the band back together wasn’t a good enough reason for you?”

 

“This wasn’t supposed to be long-term,” Taeyong set the record straight. “I was supposed to get the ship in working order and then test her on this getaway run.”

 

“Well, now that I’m back, it can be long-term again. We can raise hell like we used to. Travel the continents like old times.”

 

“How was prison,” Taeyong’s subject change was about as subtle as a ship crash.

 

“Not very fun.” Johnny took a few steps back and leaned against the wall of the pilot’s cab. “That’s why I broke out.”

 

“And scared me half to death when you just casually waltzed out of the shower last night. I thought you were a stowaway, you know. Nearly pumped your forehead full of lead.” Taeyong waved a hand in the general direction of the pistol strapped to his hip.

 

“I can’t be a stowaway on my own ship,” Johnny commented. He folded his arms across his chest.

 

“Any unfamiliar face is a stowaway. Especially on a job.”

 

Ahh, yes. Yukhei and Sicheng were in the middle of one of their biggest scams yet. That’s why Taeyong needed to park the ship around here. As a getaway. Johnny almost couldn’t keep up with the details even though Jungwoo had explained them to him twice. He was too out of practice. Assholes in prison didn’t think too deeply. Their only purpose in life was to swing their fists and cut deals with the guards to score cigarettes and not-shit food. Johnny hadn’t had to use his brain in years. Not properly anyway.

 

“They took everything from me when I went in, you know,” Johnny said. He was offering the information almost as an appeasement. “All of my augments. Gone.” His right eye was just a blank, prison-grade implant not even capable of transmitting optical data. The subdermal plate on his right hand had been surgically removed and, when the light was right, he could still see a rectangular patch of different hued skin on his palm and every fingertip where his body had repaired the damage. He glanced up at Taeyong, expecting the man to at least give him a sympathetic hum or something. Taeyong didn’t even look up. “Shit. You mad at me or something?”

 

Taeyong shrugged. “It’s just that I had finally accepted that we were through.”

 

Johnny’s chest tightened. He stood up a bit straighter. “But I’m here now. I’m back.”

 

“No, I mean…” Taeyong spared the captain an almost pitying sideways glance. “The crew. I thought we were done with… the crew. Especially after Mark left.” He looked away. “We’d all gone our separate ways. I finally believed I could live legitimately.”

 

Well damn. Johnny probably should have kept his mouth shut. Now his feelings were hurt.

 

“Yesterday was the first day in four years we were all back on this ship,” Taeyong said. “Well… almost all of us. You know what I mean. Dammit. Where the hell am I gonna park this thing?”

 

In the silence that followed, Johnny gave Taeyong a once-over. The pilot had let his hair get mullet-long. Some type of chroma had been recently applied to his silky hair, turning the locks an icy white with a metallic bluish shimmer on top. It wasn’t just his augmented eye that had changed. His whole face had stretched out with maturity. The corners around his jaw and cheeks had sharpened into casual, almost ethereal handsomeness.

 

Johnny couldn’t help but feel like he, as a person, hadn’t changed at all. Prison could do that to a man. Strip you of your identity. Even your personality, if you let it. His hair was still buzzed to his scalp. His skin was tanned from long hours of working outside. Scars from fist fights decorated his chest and shoulder blades. His fingers would probably never sit straight again, as many times as they’d been broken while he was in the clink. Fuck, the only clothes he owned was the unfashionably bright orange jumpsuit with his prisoner number branded on the back: 746501.

 

It’s not like he could walk the streets dressed like this.

 

Perhaps he should get Taeyong to buy him a few things. If he could work up the nerve to ask.

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

“I know you can hear me,” Donghyuck said. He raised the knife in his hand so that it caught the orange glow of the advertisement behind him. Something for some kind of energy drink. “I know you can understand me.”

 

The creature he was addressing stared back at him with soulless black eyes. Clearly, it didn’t see the knife - or Donghyuck, by association - as a threat to its life. It had even gone so far as to turn its back towards him and swish its feathery tail provocatively. The creature was one of the government’s bio-experiments, a hideous mix of tropical bird and weasel. It had brown fur and a long body but it also had feathered wings on its back too small to gift it flight and a large beak that could tear into both legumes _and_ flesh. They had a long, scientific name that made little sense to common folk so the species were referred to simply by what the things did: Screech.

 

“If you just give back what you took from me,” Donghyuck reasoned, “then I promise I won’t gut you and roast you over a fire.”

 

The Screech looked at him and tilted its head curiously.

 

Fuck, they were ugly things. Donghyuck almost hated looking at the things. They were everywhere, unfortunately. They bred about as bad as rats and already had the neighborhood cats outnumbered three to one.

 

“Come on, I’ve been chasing you for blocks,” Donghyuck whined. “Let’s just strike a deal, go our separate ways and pretend all of this running around didn’t happen tonight.”

 

A young couple passed him by, dressed in matching leather jackets and knee-high punk boots. Even their bright-chroma mohawks and lipstick matched. One of them raised their eyebrows at Donghyuck, more wary of the high-pitched clicking noises coming out of his mouth as opposed to the knife he was waving around in his hand. The couple left him to his madness, though. In a city like this, minding your own business was the easiest and simplest way to keep lead out of your forehead.

 

Donghyuck paid the couple no mind. If he looked away from the Screech for a moment, it would probably bolt on him and the last thing he wanted to do was lose track of it now when he’d spent half the night chasing it down. “All I want is for you to give back what you stole.” He tried his best to sound friendly. Conversational. Not-at-all desperate. But it was difficult to hide his frustration when he was this hungry and this agitated. “It hasn’t been long since you ate it. Just cough it up.”

 

The Screech opened its wide beak and ruffled its feathers. Its tiny claws made clicking sounds on the sidewalk. “I’d rather not,” it said and then took off, running farther into the alley and nearly blending in with the shadows.

 

“We could have done it the easy way,” Donghyuck sighed. “Now we’ve got to do it the hard way.” He sheathed his knife and took off running after the Screech.

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

“That’s a pretty pessimistic way of looking at it,” Yukhei commented. He tapped a finger to his plump bottom lip. “Nothing is important? Nothing matters so don’t try to do anything?”

 

The man he was chatting up had a strange look on his face. A certain angle to his eyebrows and a certain flatness to his mouth that bordered on both annoyance and amusement. He said, “We all run around like a Screech with its head chopped off trying to find something that matters. We augment ourselves. Inject ourselves. Drink. Inhale. Fuck. We do everything in excess to find something that matters but nothing does. Time. Civilization. It all moves forward no matter what. As soon as we invent something, it’s obsolete because something slightly better has already been funded and put into development. Nothing matters.”

 

Yukhei nodded slowly. “Well, I partially agree. Nothing matters. But…” He looked down at the cards splayed out in front of him. He used a thumb to just barely lift up the corners and expose the numbers. He had a shit hand. “Raise,” he said to the dealer, throwing in four new chips. “But I’ve got a bit of an opposite view. Nothing matters, so just do whatever the flying fuck you want. Augment yourself. Drink. Fuck. Whatever. Nothing matters so just live balls out.”

 

The man on the stool next to him took a drag off of his cigarette. “Call,” he said, tossing in his own four chips. When he looked back over at Yukhei, his expression had wobbled closer to amusement. In fact, he almost looked _impressed_.

 

The dealer of their game, however, didn’t even look an iota moved. “Your move,” he said, not bothering to hide his snarl.

 

Yukhei was almost offended. On any other night, he wouldn’t have accepted such behavior from a poker dealer of all people, but the stern-faced man on the other side of the table was no poker dealer. He was Sicheng. His partner. His other half. Yukhei looked up at him and scratched at the side of his nose. The motion command opened up their shared chat in his optical implant. Invisible to everyone but the two of them, the thin blue window hovered in the air above the poker table.

 

To his surprise, Sicheng had already inputted an angry message. _Hurry the flying fuck up_. It was even in Chinese, which meant Sicheng was beyond pissed.

 

Yukhei only had to think the words for them to appear in the chat. _Chill, Sicheng. This is going great._

 

Out of his mouth, Sicheng asked, “Any other bets?” Mentally, he shot more angry words into the chat. _We need to get out of here before someone on staff realizes I don’t fucking work here._ His ability to multitask was phenomenal.

 

Yukhei slumped his shoulders and stared at his cards as if seriously contemplating raising the bet again. In the chat, he said, _I’ve finally got him drunk enough._

 

Sicheng let out an audible groan.

 

The man next to Yukhei looked up, surprised at the behavior.

 

“Any other bets,” Sicheng covered his own ass.

 

“So what philosophy do you think is more efficient,” Yukhei asked, trying to grab control of the conversation again. “Nihilism or hedonism?”

 

The man on the stool next to him was tall and skinny and barely looked old enough to be in a casino, but the tattoo in thick black ink across the back of his neck was basically an all-access pass. With that on his skin, he could go into whatever the fuck building he wanted. Do whatever he damn well pleased without fear of the clink. The ink marked him as a Samurai. Not the famed Japanese warriors from nearly a thousand years ago but the gang. One of the oldest and most well-established gangs in the city. According to Sicheng’s intel, the man’s name was Lee Jeno. Son of the leader of the Samurai. Somewhere on Jeno’s person, he was carrying a black card. It was his credit card, yes, and its credit was probably limitless, but it served another purpose. If Sicheng’s info was right - fuck, of _course_ it was right - that card was also Jeno’s literal all-access pass. His skeleton key. It was one-of-a-kind. Impossible to duplicate.

 

The key, and Yukhei had used his actual eyeballs to figure this out, was in Jeno’s back right pocket. Impossible to access so long as he was sitting.

 

The key was what Yukhei and Sicheng were after. It would get them inside any of the Samurai’s establishments without triggering any alarms. The establishment they were targeting? The club Muramasa. What was on the second basement level of the Muramasa? A safe. What was in that safe?

 

The most valuable diamond in existence.

 

She was named The Perfect Heart, probably due to the way she was shaped, and on the black market, it would fetch for far more than the Lee family’s net worth! She was finely-cut. The work of a master craftsman. A _masterpiece_ , if you will.

 

Sicheng’s info also said something about it being mathematically perfect, whatever that meant, but he was the looks of this operation, not the brains, so he didn’t remember such details.

 

“Last call,” Sicheng snapped.

 

“Raise,” Yukhei shot back. He tossed four more chips onto the already towering pile.

 

“Fold,” Jeno surrendered.

 

“Alright, show your hands,” said Sicheng icily.

 

Jeno flipped over his cards with a flourish. Four of a kind. Eights across the board.

 

Yukhei flipped over his own hand. Absolute shit.

 

Jeno took one look at his hand and swore.

 

Sicheng pushed the pile of chips towards Yukhei. “Another round?”

 

“Shit. No thanks,” Jeno hissed. “I’ve lost enough tonight.”

 

Sicheng hooked his eyes towards Yukhei and filled their chat with expletives.

 

Yukhei scratched at his nose to dismiss the chat. Sicheng could be so _pushy_. “Care to dance?”

 

Jeno had been halfway through gathering his things. “I’m sorry, what?”

 

Yukhei held out his hand. “Do you wanna dance with me?”

 

Jeno stared blankly. Slowly, as if speaking to a child, he said, “This is a casino.” There was no dance floor and what music was playing could hardly be considered worthy of a jig.

 

“And,” Yukhei pressed. “Nothing matters. So fuck it.” He stood up and gave his brightest, most charismatic smile. “Dance. Just for a short while.”

 

“I’m not even into you.”

 

“I’m into me enough for both of us.”

 

Jeno couldn’t help but laugh. He snuffed out his cigarette. “Fine,” he answered. On drunk-heavy legs, he stood up and took Yukhei’s outstretched hand.

 

It was the moment they’d been waiting for! Nearly forty minutes of whiskey and ethics and bluffing his way through poker, and Yukhei had finally gotten his moment.

 

Sicheng barely even waited for Jeno to turn his back. He pulled off his white dealer gloves and exposed the subdermal implant on his left palm and fingertips. A twitch of his middle and ring fingers and he activated the illegal magnetic field generator in his implant. With just a flick of his wrist, the access key slipped out Jeno’s back pocket and whistled through the air over the poker table. Sicheng caught it between his fingers but this was no time to admire his handiwork. He shoved his augmented hand and the access key into his pocket and swiftly left the poker table.

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

Back on Johnny’s ship, Jungwoo was in the middle of an operation.

 

His fully-augmented right hand - completely robotic, not even an ounce of flesh - circled across his ‘patient’s’ skin in a fascinating dance.

 

“Is it gross that I’m hard right now,” the patient asked.

 

“For fuck’s sake, Ten. Yes,” Jungwoo grunted. His optical implant had warned him of a heart rate increase but he’d blamed it on the anesthesia wearing off.

 

“You literally have your fingers inside of me,” Ten tried to justify his reaction.

 

Jungwoo rolled his eyes. “I have microscopic needles at the tips of my fingers inside of your abdomen,” he corrected. That much was true. The needles were injecting a slurry of painkillers, antibiotics, a regenerative agent and three different accelerants that he’d home-brewed. It hurt a bit more, but it worked faster and more effectively than anything prescription. Jungwoo had only been working for about thirty minutes or so but the concoction had already taken effect. The gash in Ten’s side was closing rapidly, the tissue practically sewing itself back together.

 

It would be yet another scar on Ten’s lean torso but he liked to think of the raised skin as a trophy or a medal.

 

Jungwoo sighed. “Are you sure you didn’t get a good look at the guy who did this to you?”

 

“You’ve asked me a dozen times and my answer is the same.” Ten winced as Jungwoo’s needle-tipped fingers brushed over a ticklish spot on his abdomen. “He was wearing a hood. He was running and he bumped into me and the next goddamn thing I know, I’m fucking _bleeding_.”

 

Jungwoo knew Ten was lying. He’d only known the guy a month- that’s how long it had been since Yukhei had ‘recruited’ him aboard the ship - but Jungwoo only needed to know him that long to fundamentally understand that Ten was a pathological liar. He could tell just by the placement and angle and depth of the wound that it wasn’t something done in passing. It was a deep knife wound and the angle of entry suggested that Ten was stabbed from a low angle, like his attacker was either extremely short or kneeling. Jungwoo’s guess was that Ten had gotten into another street fight and maybe he’d been winning and had pinned his opponent down but then the other guy had brought a knife to a fist fight and… well, the story wrote itself. He didn’t pause his work as he explained, “This was dangerously close to your heart. So deep it nearly pierced your lung. This isn’t exactly easy to do accidentally. Whoever did this to you was trying to _murder_ you.”

 

“I mean, look at what I’m wearing.” Ten motioned to the cop uniform he’d ~~stolen~~ acquired.

 

“This is why I hate your games of dress-up.”

 

“It’s not a game. I’m a master of disguise, Jungwoo.” He laughed like a madman. “I’m so good at what I do.”

 

Jungwoo’s optical implant fired error message after error message across his vision. “So good at what you do that you get stabbed. Hold on a second. The middle syringe is jammed.” He pulled his fingers away from Ten’s stomach and jammed his robot hand into the console next to his lab computer.

 

Ten must have still had enough anesthesia in his system to be loopy. “If I saw me in a dark alley, I’d stab me, too.”

 

“So you were in a dark alley and not out on the street,” Jungwoo pointed out the discrepancy in Ten’s story.

 

“Motherfuck,” Ten hissed.

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

“So you… Wait. Wait. Hold on. So you… So you _stabbed_ him?” Guanheng asked. After living in the slums as long as he had, he’d heard some pretty crazy stories but this, by far, was the most out there thing he’d been told. To fully express his surprise, he switched to Chinese. “You stabbed a cop?”

 

“Uh huh,” was Kun’s dazed response.

 

“What’s the matter with you,” Guanheng asked from the other side of the table. Really, their roles should be reversed. He was younger. He was the one who should be getting scolded. “You ran into the cop in an alley?”

 

“He was just standing there.”

 

“You freaked out because you thought he knew you had stolen credit cards on you?”

 

“He was blocking the way.”

 

“So…” Guanheng coughed. This was where the story got ridiculous. “So you offered to suck his dick? Even though he hadn’t said anything to you?”

 

Kun wiped a hand over his red, splotchy cheeks. “As a distraction.”

 

“He refused your offer,” Guanheng continued to retell the story, “you insisted.”

 

“I even dropped to my knees.”

 

“He refused again so you _stab_ him?”

 

“I panicked,” Kun muttered.

 

“Are you high?” Guangheng couldn’t help but ask.

 

Kun lowered his hand from his face. “No. No! I told you I don’t use anymore.”

 

Guanheng wanted to believe him. He really did. He was just… doubtful. If he had the money to pay his monthly health insurance, he could have upgraded the subdermal implant in his hand. Something leaning towards forensics, maybe. So that he could identify the chemical makeup of liquids and compounds by sticking a robotic finger in it. That would be the easiest way to tell if the sweat on Kun’s forehead contained traces of hard drugs. At least he could tell with his eyes and just plain common sense that the knife on the table was covered in _somebody’s_ blood. Guanheng just watched as Kun pulled the last of the stolen credit cards out of his jacket pocket and fanned them out across the table between them. He still had the hood of his jacket on, but Guanheng could spot the dark circles beneath Kun’s eyes. The gauntness of his cheeks. The red rim of raw flesh around his nostrils.

 

“You _are_ high,” Guanheng ventured.

 

“I’m gonna go,” Kun announced, standing up. It was basically an admission of guilt. “I delivered the loot.” He pointed to the credit cards. “Isn’t that good enough?”

 

Guanheng couldn’t let it go. “You stabbed an _officer_.”

 

“Good night,” Kun half-shouted, wobbling towards the front door of Guanheng’s apartment. “I’m not coming down to breakfast so please just let me sleep through the morning.” With that, he was out of the door.

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

“You sure you can’t just park it on somebody’s roof,” Johnny had to know.

 

Taeyong had lowered the ship beneath two stacks of flying highway traffic and they were now hovering just above the roofs of a few mega-complexes. Being this low in the airspace was unlawful traveling, especially for a ship of this size but Taeyong was running out of options. “We’re gonna flatten one of these things if we touch down on it,” he said. If there was one thing he hadn’t missed over the past four years, it was Johnny’s incessant questioning of his every action.

 

“Why can’t we just… I don’t know… go north a few blocks towards the commercial district?”

 

“Because that wasn’t the agreed upon plan,” Taeyong grumbled, irritated. “Sicheng and Yukhei have been planning this heist for weeks. If they want me somewhere on the 2700 block, then I’m gonna be somewhere on the 2700 block.” Besides, any farther away from the casino than this and the boys wouldn’t make it out of Samurai territory once the alert had been sounded. Of course, the crew had gone over all of this so often that they could recite the plan in their sleep. Johnny, on the other hand, their captain, had barely been out of prison a full day/night cycle and thought he could challenge their plans. Aloud, Taeyong said, “Just let me focus. I’m trying not to hit anything out here.”

 

Skillfully, he lowered the ship even closer to ground level. With his augmented eye, he kept track of every gauge, every proximity alert, every map overlay. Anything at his disposal. The front windshield just wasn’t enough for this kind of precise maneuvering. With a steady hand on the controls, he guided the wide ship between two buildings, leaving himself room for only a breath of error before he sent the flying ship through someone’s bathroom wall.

 

A minute later, Taeyong brought the ship to a halt right in the middle of a poorly-lit side street. Taeyong killed all of the ship’s exterior lights and strobes. Just like that, even something as big as this had become another part of the metal and glass scenery of downtown.

 

“This works, too,” Johnny said with a smirk, peeping out of the front windshield. “I’ll just tell Yukhei and Sicheng to climb eight stories up the side of a building.”

 

Would he ever shut up? Taeyong swung his fist backwards. Once again, it connected with Johnny’s crotch.

 

The man howled and hobbled out of Taeyong’s swinging range. Johnny wheezed like a dying man. “Goddamn. I thought you’d knocked them into my stomach for a second. What the shit was that for?”

 

“I know what the fuck I’m doing,” Taeyong snapped. “Stop standing over my shoulder.”

 

Johnny collapsed to the floor, overtaken by a sudden stomach ache.

 

“I’m close enough now that I can see Sicheng and Yukhei.” Taeyong pointed towards his glowing blue eye. “Well, close enough to see their data connection. I can track their movements like this and when they make a run for it, I can swing onto the main road and swoop them up.”

 

Johnny was still nursing his beaten balls. He was tempted to peel out of his prison uniform right then and there just to check and make sure Taeyong hadn’t actually crushed one of them. “Fine,” he gave in. “You all have everything under control.”

 

It wasn’t the most thrilling discovery, Johnny realized.

 

He had spent the past four years in prison firmly believing that his crew had been struggling without him. It wasn’t all that far-fetched. When they’d first started this hedonistic _privateer_ gig, Jungwoo was practically tending to most of their injuries with the augmented equivalent of duct tape. Taeyong panicked at the wheel whenever the ‘check engine’ light came on. Yukhei couldn’t walk a block without being distracted by bussy and Sicheng couldn’t walk a block without being distracted by pussy. Mark was probably the only reliable one, a brilliant strategist who didn’t hesitate to toss morals and ethics aside for a job.

 

Now, Johnny realized, Taeyong could fix up an entire ship by himself. Yukhei and Sicheng were both billionaires with their scammed money. Mark was gone, replaced by some _new guy_. And Jungwoo had turned one of the ship’s break rooms into a fully-outfitted top-of-the-line operating room.

 

They didn’t need their captain at all.

 

Perhaps he should have stayed in prison.

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

Critical success!

 

With the Samurai all-access pass in their possession, the Perfect Heart was already theirs. Yukhei just had to keep Jeno distracted until Sicheng had gotten out of the casino and far enough away that he - and more importantly the _card_ \- wouldn’t get caught up once their theft had been detected.

 

It was a foolproof plan, Yukhei believed, so he dropped his guard and allowed himself to smile and laugh and dance with the black-haired dude in his arms who was, at that moment, his greatest enemy.

 

Through the light haze of alcohol in his system, Yukhei found a beat in the music where there wasn’t much of a beat and spun Jeno across the casino floor. Excitement bubbled up in the lower half of his stomach as Jeno’s hands grew bolder, dropping from his shoulders to his chest to his waist.

 

Yukhei was so confident, so deep in his internal celebration of their apparent victory, that it took him several seconds to catch on to the fact that the object pressed to his crotch was a long-barreled pistol and not a groping hand. “Jesus fuck,” he whimpered.

 

“Where is it,” Jeno purred into Yukhei’s ear, a surprising amount of sensuality in his voice.

 

“Where is what,” Yukhei asked, genuinely confused.

 

Jeno’s finger clicked the safety on his pistol back. “Where is my key?”

 

Yukhei nearly laughed in his face. He raised both of his hands up in surrender. “I don’t have it.”

 

Jeno shoved the pistol more firmly into Yukhei’s crotch. Despite the very high chance it was about to get blown off, his dick got hard anyway.

 

Bravely, Yukhei said, “Surely, you’ve got a fancy as fuck optical implant in there somewhere.” He gazed hard into one of Jeno’s eyes and then the other. He couldn’t quite tell if he had one. In the past, you could more easily tell. The eyeball was more metal than organic. Nowadays, they looked like the real thing. Down to the veins. “Scan me. I don’t have it.”

 

Jeno grit his teeth. “That bitchy poker dealer, then?”

 

Yukhei blamed his drunkenness on the fact that he gasped and said, “How did you know?” He slapped a hand over his own mouth, far too late.

 

“I could tell you two were in a private chat,” Jeno hissed. “Think I can’t tell when someone’s reading a chat or a menu right in front of me? You think I’m dumb?”

 

“No. Absolutely not. No,” Yukhei said, sounding far more patronizing than he’d intended.

 

Jeno let out a low growl of annoyance.

 

Yukhei squeezed his eyes shut. He could tell by the trembling of the muzzle that Jeno was getting antsy. Nervous. Just a touch too much pressure on the trigger would riddle his dick in bullet holes. He had to play this right. “I’m pretty positive everything will be alright. Once the Samurai find out it’s your fault the Perfect Heart’s been stolen, they’ll probably execute you on the spot!” He hadn’t meant to laugh.

 

Jeno’s face lost all of it’s color. “You son of a bitch.”

 

“My mother was a saint,” Yukhei retorted. He reared back and headbutted Jeno, sending him sprawling to the casino floor, his gun skittering across the tiles.

 

No one in the crowd batted an eyelash or looked in their direction. Their high-stakes games were more important.

 

Yukhei didn’t wait around to watch Jeno pick himself up off of the floor. He was already slipping through the crowd and making his way to the exit.

 

He could only hope he had given Sicheng enough time.

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

“Something’s wrong,” Taeyong said. His augmented eye was bright blue as he flicked it left and right, sifting through menus and net browser tabs. “Something’s really wrong.”

 

Johnny pushed himself to his feet. “Is it shitty of me that I’ve been sitting here waiting for you to say something along those lines?”

 

“Yeah,” Taeyong let him know without hesitation. “Extremely.”

 

Johnny shuffled across the cab and peered over the ship’s navigation panels. “Anything I can help with?” It was his ship, after all. The one he’d had since he’d boosted it from some American at the ripe old age of 16. Johnny looked and looked but he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary on any of the gauges or panels.

 

“Nothing’s wrong with the ship,” Taeyong said, shooing Johnny away from the controls. “I think Yukhei and Sicheng blew their cover.”

 

“Huh, how do you figure,” Johnny wondered. He peered through the front windshield but the street below them was just as empty and clean as it had been earlier in the night.

 

The door to the cabin swung open. Jungwoo stepped inside. “What’s up? You pinged me?”

 

Johnny glanced over his shoulder to get a good look at the man. He had changed about as drastically as Taeyong had over these last few years. Gone were his chubby cheeks and fat belly, all of it replaced by hard edges and wiry, athletic muscle. Something else was gone, too. His entire right hand. His arm ended in a flat metal plate a little bit shy of where his wrist would be.

 

Jungwoo noticed him staring. “My hand’s recharging,” he explained. Then he returned his attention to Taeyong. “Dude, make this quick. I can barely see because both of my eyes are installing updates.”

 

Taeyong said, “A high-pitched and wide-range frequency went off about fifty seconds ago.”

 

“Can you tell where it originated?”

 

“It’s hard to triangulate because everything I’m looking at is lit up like a druggie but…” He squinted and then moved his left hand to open up his settings menu. After a few adjustments, he said, “All I can tell is that it started to the west and expanded outwards, triggering the same frequency in other comm devices as it travelled.”

 

Jungwoo nodded, not exactly as worried as he should have been. “Probably a Samurai alarm.”

 

“Dammit,” Taeyong hissed. “Here I was trying to be hopeful and believe it was something else. Shit! That means the Samurai will be closing in on us four whole minutes earlier than we planned.”

 

Johnny tried to exert some kind of authority over the situation. “We should abort the mission. Get out of here.”

 

“Yukhei and Sicheng are still down there,” Jungwoo blinked his eyes open wide. _Now_ he cared.

 

“They are the ones who fucked up,” said Johnny. “And we’ll be caught in the crosshairs if we get involved.”

 

“But they’re our _crew_.” Jungwoo stepped towards Johnny and swung like he was trying to slap a hand down on the man’s arm or something. He must have forgotten that he’d removed his prosthetic. He missed Johnny’s arm by the width of the ocean.

 

“Another alarm just went off,” Taeyong said. “Or, rather, the same one again. I just lost track of the boys. I can’t see anything through all of the electronic noise.”

 

“You have to find them.” Jungwoo’s voice went shrill with panic. He rushed up to the pilot’s chair. “We can’t leave without them.”

 

“We can,” said Johnny. Had prison made him softer than he’d realized? Why was no one listening to him? How had he lost their respect? “We _should_. We’ll be sitting ducks if the Samurai catch us out here. They’ll blow us out of the sky if we can’t shoot first.”

 

Taeyong ignored him. “The signals cleared up. I’ve spotted them. Shit, I’m glad we’ve got their implants linked to the ship’s server. All I had to do was filter the search to only display connected devices.”

 

“Where are they?” This was a different voice.

 

Johnny glanced towards the cab door to see an unfamiliar face. A man with graceful posture and a statuesque nose. Gauze was wrapped around his middle. He only had on a pair of slacks. The skin of his torso was mottled by about as many scars as Johnny’s own frame but he could tell by looking at the newcomer that he wasn’t an ex-convict. He looked too clean. Smelled too fresh.

 

Taeyong answered Ten’s question. “Sicheng is about two blocks away. We should move in and swoop him up. Yukhei must be… taking a detour or something? He’s running in the opposite direction.”

 

Jungwoo wasn’t able to see anything Taeyong could see but he stared out of the front windshield regardless. “Must have someone on his tail. Doesn’t want to lead them here.”

 

“I can go down there,” Ten suggested. Such simple words sounded like a terrorist threat.

 

“You’re still injured,” Jungwoo dissuaded him. “You’ll undo all of my work.”

 

“And our plan doesn’t exactly account for three peeps on the ground,” Taeyong said. He pressed a series of buttons on the ship’s console. Auto pilot had been disengaged. He was now manually flying. “But maybe you can man the cannon.”

 

“I love gripping a big gun,” Ten said with a wink. Then he retreated from the cab, heading to the roof.

 

Johnny was the captain. Is the captain. Should be the captain. But he felt like nothing more than an invisible rookie.

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

Donghyuck had followed the Screech down alleyway after alleyway. Even with its bright, multi-colored feathers, the thing was hard to keep track of among the neon-glow of all of the advertisements and signage vying for attention on the side of every building.

 

A few of the streets were narrow, littered with trash and the occasional corpse, but most of the streets were wide and open and brightly lit. Some of them were decorated with banners and flags and strings of light as if the city was always in the middle of some festival celebration. People milled about on these wide rivers of pavement, showing off their fancy cars, chatting, smoking and drinking, kissing and dancing to pulsing music. At every block corner, there were street vendors. Some selling food. Some selling clothing. A handful sold black market augments if you knew where to look and who to talk to. One vendor booth sold guns, the things brightly painted and arranged in color-coded rows like they weren’t much different from stuffed animal prizes at a fair game.

 

These streets were Donghyuck’s stomping ground. His territory. His home.

 

While the rich corporations got richer and continued their ever-upward journey through the city’s steel towers, street-level was reserved for the down and out. The castaways. The fledgling gang members.

 

...and rogue Screeches.

 

At long last, the creature stopped moving, trembling with exhaustion.

 

Donghyuck was also breathing hard and heavy, his body ready to keel over, but years of hunting down people who tried to double cross him, trying to chase down food or run away from men trying to shoot him had made him near-immune to the demands of his own body. “I can do this all night,” Donghyuck exhaled, speaking in the clicks and whistles of the Screech language.

 

The animal made no move, even as Donghyuck stalked towards it, unsheathing his knife.

 

“You could have coughed it up when I asked, but no…” He made a motion command with his left hand. By a magnetic pull, the knife jumped from his right to his left. He made the same command with his right hand. The knife flew through the air, snapping to the palm of his right hand. His subdermal implants vibrated against his bones. “Now, even if you do cooperate, I’m going to skin you and roast you because I’m _starving_.”

 

By then, he’d gotten to the street curb. He was standing immediately over the Screech now. One lunge and his knife would be in the thing’s spine.

 

The Screech twisted around and looked up at him in some bastardized attempt at sadness.

 

Donghyuck was even immune to this kind of begging. Screeches were quite ugly. He couldn’t even pretend to sympathize with the abominable things.

 

“Now, hold still…” Donghyuck hissed. He tightened his grip on his knife.

 

The sound of a gunshot from very close by made both boy and animal flinch and whirl around to face the noise.

 

A tall man in a decent designer suit came barrelling down the sidewalk towards them. Most of the other people on the street had fled or ducked at the sound of the gun and the running man leaped over their crouched and cowering bodies like it was nothing. “Coming through,” he shouted out.

 

Donghyuck took several steps back to get out of the man’s path. No need to get directly involved, he thought. But he was down to loot some pockets if the man tripped or got shot. Then he realized something. “Hey!” Donghyuck pressed himself to the wall of a building. “Why are you running to _me_?” He had been talking to the Screech for so long that he didn’t realize he was still speaking in their squawking tongue. Goddammit, if this guy got him involved with his mess… Donghyuck raised his right hand, making sure the knife he clutched was clearly visible.

 

It had been what the dude in the suit wanted. He held up his own hand and made a motion command.

 

The knife was yanked right out of Donghyuck’s grip. It flew through the air and the handle slapped against the stranger’s palm with a metallic _shwing_.

 

Donghyuck watched the man in the suit run away with _his_ knife. He couldn’t believe it! He thought he’d coded the thing so it would only respond to his commands!

 

A second later, a lithe young man in an even more opulent suit ran past him. He had the mark of the Samurai on the back of his neck and fired another bullet with the gun he held in his hand.

 

In seconds, both men were up the street and out of sight.

 

“Now that,” Donghyuck said in Korean, propping his hands up on his hips and shaking his head, “that’s something you actually see every day around here.”

 

He looked down towards the curb where the Screech had been standing but - he should have seen this part coming - it had ran away while he wasn’t looking.

 

The hunt continued.

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

Kun shuffled through the streets, high as a kite.

 

The world always felt a little better when he had something fuzzy in his bloodstream.

 

With riots in the streets and cops barely managing to keep things in order, the world was just a straight up shitty place. The economic divide between the haves and have-nots got wider and wider every generation. Politicians got on news holos and lied their asses off. It was easier to stroll down the street and buy a gun than it was to score a pair of sneakers in his size.

 

Sometimes, life was just easier to handle when he numbed up all of his senses with drugs.

 

He didn’t consider himself a saint by any means. He never thought of himself as above it all.

 

Kun was a criminal through and through. He’d been cheating and thieving all of his life, having been born and raised down here in the slums. Even with the gargantuan surplus of money he’d stolen over the years, he still considered himself unfortunate.

 

He could move out of the slums. Get clean. Try to live legitimately. But it was too much of a risk.

 

If he moved into some high-floor apartment in one of the city’s countless mega-complexes, somehow, somewhere, someone would put two and two together and realize he didn’t belong. They’d figure out that he hadn’t worked an honest day in his life. It was easy enough to hack the system and scrub charges from his record but someone out there could see all of his indictments which meant he’d never be able to relax if he tried to go legit. He’d live in constant fear that he’d be found out. Rendered helpless by electronic handcuffs designed to short-circuit any augment. Tossed into the back of some cop car like the sack of garbage he was.

 

Shit.

 

No matter how much money he had, he’d rather live down here in the slums among all of the other criminals rather than sit himself comfortable and pretty in a tower.

 

He was anonymous down here.

 

After nearly an hour’s walk, he’d left downtown far behind and found himself at the harbor.

 

He walked along the harbor’s cement paths, inhaling the familiar grimy, salty air. Off to his left, he could see the ocean. He didn’t care how polluted it was. He still found beauty in it and the freedom that it offered. Kun turned his gaze towards the derelict warehouse that sat between Pier 17 and Pier 18.

 

Home.

 

Kun took his time shuffling towards it. Being out alone was dangerous at night but such risk didn’t make it to his brain through the fog of drugs in his system. Besides, he and his crew owned this harbor.

 

Though it was ironic that they didn’t own a ship.

 

The damn things were expensive as fuck! Even the ones that didn’t fly!

 

It had been a childhood dream of his to gather a crew and take to the skies. Sail over the ocean and see the world that lay beyond this peninsula. Ever since he was young, he’d idolized Johnny the Sky Pirate. To him, Johnny embodied freedom of choice. Danger. Fun. Hedonism.

 

Yet even Johnny had gotten caught. Thrown into the clink like any other criminal. The law hadn’t just imprisoned Johnny on that day four years ago. They’d also imprisoned Kun’s dreams.

 

Now he had no desire to leave the ground.

 

The warehouse Kun called home was old but it was massive. Spacious enough to store a class-A airship. He and his crew had long since built walls and put up partitions inside of it, though, turning what was once a wide open space into a multi-room hostel. Downstairs were 127 small living compartments, barely large enough to fit the basic necessities like a fridge and a port to access the net, but even that was more than a lot of kids in the slums had access to. Kun used his stockpile of stolen cash to keep everything running, taking in waifs and strays off the street.

 

Upstairs, though, the accommodations were larger, bigger, better furnished. He and his crew were far more permanent residents, after all.

 

“Kun, you alright?” Mark asked as he watched the man stagger to the top of the metal staircase.

 

Kun misinterpreted the question. He looked down at himself and patted his chest as if to make sure he hadn’t walked into any wild switchblades. “Why wouldn’t I be alright?”

 

Mark made a face at him. “You said you stopped using.” The stick of a lollipop hung from between the younger man’s teeth. Sour apple, Kun figured based on the smell.

 

“I must have accidentally bumped into a needle,” Kun mumbled.

 

“Come on, man,” Mark chided. He stood up off of the couch where he’d been lounging. “What about setting an example for the kids?”

 

“You’re a kid,” Kun grunted. He wiped sweat from his brow and sighed. Why the hell were these youngins always getting on his case? First Guanheng. Then Mark. He desperately needed to make friends his own age.

 

“Anyways.” Mark gripped Kun by the forearm and half-led half-dragged him towards the couch. “I caught wind of a Samurai alert going out. Something big happened.”

 

“You think I had something to do with it?” Kun yanked his arm free of the younger man’s grip.

 

“No. But since you brought it up, did you?”

 

Kun shook his head. He flopped down on the couch, reveling in the feel of the luxe fabric against his hands. “I had nothing to do with it. All I did tonight was pass some loot to Guanheng.”

 

“And get high,” Mark needled him. “Even though you promised you’d get clean.”

 

Kun changed the subject. “Do you know why the Samurai alert went out?”

 

Mark sighed with the last of his patience. “My scanner only picked up on the signals. I don’t have anything installed to get me more detailed info than that.”

 

Kun did. He waved a hand in front of his eye to open up his home screen but, Jesus fuck, he was too impaired to make heads or tails of the blue-green diagrams and words blinking to life in his vision. “Fuck.” He squeezed his eyes shut until the menu closed. “The Samurai don’t use alerts often. It had to be something big.”

 

“That’s what I told you at the start,” Mark said through clenched teeth.

 

Kun relaxed back onto the couch and prayed for sleep. He was sitting still. He knew he was sitting still. But his stomach lurched side to side like he was standing on the deck of a boat out to sea. He hoped he wasn’t about to vomit. “It’s none of our business,” he managed. “We’re no longer in direct alliance with the Samurai. We don’t have to respond.”

 

“We should,” Mark said. He sat down on the opposite end of the couch. “For old time’s sake.”

 

“Old time’s sake can suck my balls,” Kun muttered. Then he was out like a light.

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

Sicheng ran down the street as fast as his legs could carry him.

 

The Samurai’s all-access card was still magnetized to the palm of his augmented hand.

 

“Shit shit shit,” he chanted in time to his boots hitting the pavement.

 

He couldn’t believe they’d actually done it! They’d be set for life once they got their hands on the Perfect Heart. No black market dealer would dare buy it off of them out of fear of incurring the Samurai’s wrath, of course, but the gang themselves would probably fork over an unimaginable amount of cash to get it back. They wouldn’t risk anything happening to their prized diamond.

 

“Where are you, Yukhei,” Sicheng panted. He’d sent message after message to their chat in English, Korean and Chinese, all in hopes that Yukhei would just respond, but his partner in crime had remained silent. “Please don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead, you arrogant fuck.” He’d heard the gunshots.

 

Sicheng charged through a crowd. Anyone with smarts ducked out of his way. Everyone else got shoved to the pavement.

 

He got a few threats hurled at his back but, for the most part, no one really paid him much mind. The sight of someone running for their lives through the city streets wasn’t exactly uncommon. Sicheng would have done what most of these people were doing. He’d have minded his own business.

 

Sicheng’s comm link crackled to life. “Sicheng, babe,” it was Johnny’s voice in his ear, “what the ever loving fuck happened down there?”

 

It was like hearing the words of a ghost. Sure, Sicheng had seen Johnny with his own eyes just last night but it was still difficult to remember that the guy was actually out of prison. “Don’t call me babe,” he huffed. “I’m not Taeyong.”

 

“I’m not babe, either. Fuck that.” Sicheng heard Taeyong shout. “He wishes.”

 

“What happened,” Johnny repeated.

 

Sicheng turned a corner so that he could get off the main street and slow down a bit. “Our target caught on quicker than we expected. Probably knew what we were doing the second Yukhei sat down at the poker table and bribed the other players to leave.”

 

“You’re losing your touch,” Taeyong picked at him.

 

“I’m not losing anything,” Sicheng exhaled. Shit. Sicheng hated even the idea that Jeno had been playing along with them the whole time.

 

Johnny asked, “I’m assuming you have the key?”

 

“Who the fuck do you think I am?” He checked his palm just to make sure.

 

“My subordinate,” Johnny snapped.

 

Fuck. Sicheng slowed down from a full run to a half-jog. “Sorry. I’m stressed out.”

 

Taeyong’s voice came over the line. “Get aboard the ship,” he said calmly. “Then we can track Yukhei.”

 

“Where are you guys,” Sicheng wondered. He was on the right block but he hadn’t spotted the ship yet.

 

“Look up,” Taeyong told him.

 

Sicheng did so. Literally right above his head, blending in with the angular shapes of the residential buildings, Sicheng spotted the darkened outline of Johnny’s ship.

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

No matter how fast Yukhei ran, Jeno stayed right on his heels.

 

“Goddamn,” he wheezed. “Such stamina.”

 

He had to remember that this was no ordinary, average mark. This was the son of the Samurai head. Of course he’d been combat trained and probably half-tortured just as _practice_. A short little sprint wouldn’t wear him out.

 

At least he was a shitty marksman.

 

Whenever Jeno shot at him, the bullets went wide, pinging off the pavement near his feet in a shower of sparks.

 

Yukhei hadn’t exactly thought to count the number of rounds. He wasn’t sure how empty Jeno’s clip was. He wasn’t sure if he’d stand a chance if he spun around with that kid’s knife in his hand. He could fight, yes, but fists and blades always had a tendency to lose to guns.

 

“Fuck.” Yukhei needed a lucky break. He was running out of alleys to duck into. They were getting close to the harbor and a wide-open space like that provided no cover to duck behind.

 

There was also the possibility that other Samurai members were closing in on his location.

 

His only way out was either lead through the head or the depths of the ocean… and Yukhei had never learned to swim.

 

“Please don’t be dead, Sicheng,” he hissed into the night air. “As long as you make it, as long as you get that diamond, I don’t care what happens to me.” Nothing mattered, after all. And he’d lived his life to the absolute fullest.

 

A loud noise from behind him tore through his thoughts.

 

A bullet whizzed by his ear so closely that he heard it _zing_ off the comm device implanted in a cuff around his cartilage.

 

Then there was another loud noise. Another gunshot.

 

He let out a startled shout. His fancy dress shoes had no grip. He took a corner too fast and slid to the ground, rolling and tumbling until he came to a halt in the middle of the alley. His new suit was now ruined from the filth on the ground. He tried to stand up and keep running. He couldn’t hoist himself upright.

 

An entirely different shout escaped his throat as realization hit him.

 

He’d just been shot.

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

Guanheng’s place was usually a hubbub of activity during the daylight hours. Dejun and Renjun usually came over, swapping stories and stolen merchandise, trying to get Guanheng to scan and appraise their shit so they could estimate how much money they’d make selling it on the street. Sometimes Yangyang would pay a visit as well, showing off the knockoff handbags he’d hand-stitched or the guns he’d 3D printed. Guanheng had a bit of a supervisory role. Usually there to correct any bad math or stitch up any injuries or keep arguments from getting physical. Still, though, he enjoyed the laughter and the noise and the company. When the sun went down and everyone went to their respective homes and locked themselves in until daybreak, Guangheng’s apartment got quiet and empty and he couldn’t help but feel a little lonely in such a big place all alone.

 

Even Kun’s strung out ass had been a welcome sight and not just because the credit cards he’d dropped off would keep his boys’ fridges full for the next month.

 

So to avoid being alone, Guanheng went outside to run errands.

 

A dangerous task at this time of night but he was out and about for good reason.

 

First, a trip to the automated bank. Using his subdermal implant, he jacked himself into the system and cut the camera feeds so he wouldn’t be recorded. Then he dove a little deeper to bypass a few walls so that he could do all of this without flagging any accounts. It was standard hacking. Nothing too difficult with his level of equipment. Keeping an eye on the parking lot behind him, he fed the machine each of the stolen cards Kun had gathered for him. He checked their balances. Some of them had negative amounts. Others only had spare change. A handful had more reasonable amounts. Guanheng transferred what he could. A little bit to Dejun, a little bit to Renjun, a little bit to Yangyang. There was even enough for Chenle to get some this month.

 

Guanheng never asked Kun how he acquired the cards each month. Through brute force? Scam? Pick-pocketing? He never asked because some truths were better left sitting in the dark. Besides, Kun never asked Guanheng where he got any of the hacked augments he sold on the side.

 

They owed each other that much privacy.

 

His bank work done, Guanheng fixed the walls in the machine’s system that he’d knocked down and got the cameras back online. He untethered himself from the machine and went about his business.

 

His second stop was the 24 hour convenience store. He filled his basket with instant ramen, a case of banana milk, pre-packaged honey toast, eyeball cleaning solution and condoms. When he walked out the door, his optical implant informed him of his purchase.

 

His third stop was beneath one of the highway bridges where the homeless people congregate around their scrap metal shanty houses and barrels full of stinking, burning trash. None of them paid him any mind as he strolled through in his clean, white shirt and pressed slacks. He stopped at one of the flaming barrels, reached into his jacket pocket and disposed of the dozens and dozens of now-useless credit cards.

 

He was halfway to his fourth stop of the night when a thought crossed his mind.

 

“It’s a very quiet night.”

 

There were plenty of people out and about, but it had been over an hour and he hadn’t spotted an ounce of trouble yet.

 

Oddly, such peace made him more tense, more guarded, more suspicious.

 

Guanheng turned a corner, heading towards one of the main streets. He got all of eight steps before a young kid - he couldn’t have been much older than Yangyang - came running out of an alley looking wide-eyed, dirty and insane, speaking in the whistles and clicks of a Screech.

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

Donghyuck collided with someone.

 

Not exactly hard enough to send either of them to the asphalt, but definitely with enough force to temporarily daze him so that he couldn’t see or hear the fist swinging towards his head until it had connected with his jaw.

 

Donghyuck screamed at the top of his lungs. He backed away and held a hand to his chin. “Are you insane,” he asked the man who had just socked him in the face for no reason.

 

“What about you?” The man threw the question back at him. In one hand, he carried a disposable basket from one of those pay-as-you-leave stores that only people with decent money in their accounts liked to frequent. His other hand, Donghyuck noticed, hovered dangerously close to his hip as if he was a moment away from drawing a concealed weapon on him.

 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Donghyuck called out. He couldn’t exactly defend himself now that the weirdo in the suit had disarmed him. “Why would you call _me_ insane?”

 

“Seriously,” the man raised both of his eyebrows. “You leaped out of that alley at me grunting and screeching at me like… a Screech.”

 

“Shit. It’s not what it looks like, alright?” Donghyuck took his eyes off the stranger and searched the sidewalk. “I wasn’t trying to rob you or anything. I was…” There was no sign of the Screech. Even with his optical implant optimized to show animal footprints, a semi-busy street like this one made tracking difficult. Too many shoe prints. Too much dirt and grime and stagnant water coating everything, obscuring his scanner’s algorithms.

 

“You were what?” The stranger no longer seemed to be reaching for a weapon, but he still seemed tense and confrontational.

 

“Just mind your own business,” Donghyuck snapped. His scanner picked up Screech footprints heading west. The spacing was off, though. There was a possibility it wasn’t the same one he’d been after all night. Still, a lead was a lead. He started west.

 

“Hold on.” The stranger grabbed Donghyuck by the sleeve of his shirt.

 

Donghyuck yanked his shirt free. “What?”

 

“All of this was a misunderstanding so I won’t hold it against you but just tell me how the fuck you managed to tame one of those things.”

 

“Huh?” Donghyuck waved a hand in front of his eye to dismiss the footprint-scanning algorithm he had going. Now he could properly see the stranger’s beseeching face. “Tame one of what?”

 

The stranger pointed.

 

Donghyuck just barely felt it: the weight of a Screech sitting on top of his head, resting among the soft curls of his hair. “Are you fucking kidding?” Donghyuck raised his hands, attempting to strangle the goddamn thing, but the Screech leaped off of his head, flapping its flightless wings before landing on the sidewalk.

 

The Screech screeched and then took off running.

 

Donghyuck was properly furious now. He resumed the chase, nothing but murderous intent in his heart.

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

Sicheng had been aboard Johnny’s flying ship for all of sixty seconds before Ten, Taeyong and Jungwoo came charging onto the loading bay, bombarding him with questions.

 

“Shit,” Jungwoo bellowed, colliding with him. “You aren’t hurt or anything are you?” He poked and prodded at Sicheng’s face and arms with his left hand as if searching for any injuries or testing for any pain.

 

“I’m just sweaty and exhausted.” Sicheng none-too-gently slapped the medic’s organic hand away. “It’s Yukhei we should be worried about. He’s still out there and he hasn’t responded to any of my messages.”

 

“He stopped moving about two minutes ago,” Taeyong said. He was facing towards the right, his glowing blue eye letting him see beyond the storage shelves he was staring at. “He could be hiding. Opening a comm link could be dangerous for him right now.”

 

“I still think I would have been a better fit for this,” said Ten, looking Sicheng up and down. “Anyone in their right mind can tell that you aren’t a poker dealer.”

 

“What?” Sicheng snapped. Why had Yukhei brought this guy onboard again? “I did my research. This is exactly what casino staff wear.”

 

“Uhh, no,” Ten contradicted. He yanked the white glove Sicheng was wearing straight off his hand. “Red flag number one. This is last year’s design. Obsolete.” He tossed the glove aside and pulled on Sicheng’s shirt sleeve. “Red flag number two. You didn’t roll these up high enough. A good shark can still slip a card up there.” He flattened his hand against Sicheng’s chest. “Your name tag sits too low. Your bow tie is crooked. Your-”

 

“Okay, okay, goddamn.” Sicheng slapped Ten’s hand away. So the dude _wasn’t_ just a pretty face. “I still got the key, didn’t I?”

 

“Actually,” Taeyong said, joining their little huddle. “Let me see this.” He pried the card free of Sicheng’s augmented hand. The light in his eye glowed and flickered as he examined the key card, flipping it this way and that. “Shit. Shit. Shit!”

 

“Fuck. What is it?” Jungwoo had to know.

 

“Spit it out, man,” Sicheng added.

 

“This is no key card.” Taeyong held up the black all-access card.

 

“Yeah it is,” Sicheng said. “I paid out the wazoo for that info.”

 

Taeyong shook his head. “No… I mean it is a key card in that it looks like one…”

 

“But…” Jungwoo prompted.

 

Taeyong took in a deep breath and let it out. “This is a bomb,” he said with ridiculous calm. “And it’s rigged to blow in less than a minute.”

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

“Who do you work for?” Jeno shouted, out of breath. He walked another slow lap around the man he’d shot. “You don’t want me to set off on you again, do you?”

 

The man in the suit on the ground just wheezed and held a hand to his side, the fabric of his white suit turning red beneath his palm.

 

Jeno kept his pistol trained on the man, ready to put his last bullet through the guy’s head if he had to. “Who the fuck do you work for!?”

 

“I don’t work for anyone,” the man on the ground grunted.

 

“Lies,” Jeno hissed. He approached the sprawled man and put his booted foot on his chest. “You clearly had a decent informant and that sham dealer at the table was in on your game. No bum off the street has those connections.”

 

“You think I’m a bum,” Yukhei asked, indignant. “Dressed like this?” He grinned and waved a hand to indicate his designer suit.

 

“That shit’s not even tailored,” said Jeno. He pointed his gun down at the man, aiming between his eyes. The power trip was such a rush. He almost never found himself in such an advantageous position. Most altercations ended before he could properly start a fight. The tattoo on the back of his neck was enough for most men to bend in submission. “Who do you work for?”

 

“I don’t have a boss,” Yukhei stated, staring straight into the business end of Jeno’s pistol without a hint of fear on his face.

 

“Oh, you’ll want to tell me.”

 

“Why? So you can hunt them down and get your buddies to shoot their ship out of the sky?”

 

Jeno kicked Yukhei in the chest and stepped backwards, but he kept his gun aimed at the man’s forehead. “Fine, then. Don’t tell me. I’ll just let the bomb do it’s work.”

 

“Bomb?” Yukhei winced and pushed himself upright. “What bomb?” He thought it through and answered his own question. “The key card!”

 

“Do you really think I’d just carry the real one in my fucking back pocket?”

 

“It was a trap. From the very start!”

 

“We’re the Samurai, you bumbling idiot. You think we don’t know when someone’s been snooping through our system? Asking questions about our facilities? Our men are _loyal_ and every time you and your friend bought info off of them, they came right to us to report it.”

 

“Impressive,” Yukhei huffed. With a great deal of effort, he stood up. “Johnny.”

 

“Huh?” Jeno asked.

 

“I’m answering your question,” Yukhei replied. “Who I work for. Johnny.”

 

“Johnny the Sky Pirate?” Jeno filled in. He scoffed. “You work for a fucking sky pirate who has been in the clink for the last four goddamn years?”

 

Yukhei braced himself against the wall of the nearby building and made his slow, shuffling way towards the mouth of the alley. “He broke out,” Yukhei announced, beaming proudly. “Just last night, he broke out. It hasn’t hit the news because the authorities think he’s useless without his augments.”

 

“ _Anyone_ would be useless without their augments.” Jeno wasn’t sure why his hand was shaking. He wasn’t sure why he couldn’t just pull the trigger and put this guy out of his misery.

 

“Not our Johnny,” Yukhei told him, sparing him a backwards glance. “Who would have thought that losing an eye would only _increase_ his vision.”

 

“What the absolute fuck are you on about?” Jeno couldn’t even keep up the pretense anymore. He lowered his gun.

 

Yukhei stood at the mouth of the alley. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the distance between them. “You Samurai better watch out. We came at you with a single ship and lost which is how our captain got locked up. But now…” He turned the corner, leaving Jeno’s line of sight. “Now we’ve got a fleet!”

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

Taeyong used his augmented eye to access the ship’s auxiliary controls. “I just opened the side hatch.” He held up the ticking time bomb. “Someone toss this out while I go to the bridge and get us away from this residential zone.”

 

For a harrowing second, no one moved. Everyone was too afraid to touch it.

 

Johnny rushed into the room. “I’ll do it,” he took control. “Everyone find a place to secure yourselves. We’re moving fast.” He sprinted towards Taeyong and snatched the false key card from between the pilot’s fingers. When everyone remained standing still, paralyzed with anxiety, Johnny put some bass in his voice. “Captain’s orders.”

 

That got everyone moving. Jungwoo and Ten bolted towards a door that led to a lower deck. Taeyong made a beeline for the control cab on the upper deck.

 

Johnny mentally mapped out his ship and calculated the fastest route between the storage bay and the side hatch on the starboard side. He made a run for it.

 

In a wild, manic blur, he rushed down corridor after corridor.

 

On his left was Jungwoo’s makeshift operating room. Further down was the galley. Around the corner was the recreation room, the massive television on the wall broadcasting the news to an empty set of chairs.

 

He raced down a short flight of stairs. He’d been counting the seconds in his head. He would just barely make it!

 

This hallway held the crew’s personal cabins, the showers, and one of the numerous stock rooms around the ship that was loaded full of years of stolen goods and treasures.

 

Johnny turned one last corner. He could smell outdoor air. He could feel the chilly, nighttime breeze. The hatch was right up the hall!

 

Beneath him, the ship lurched upwards at take-off speed.

 

Taeyong had made it to the bridge and was executing emergency maneuvers.

 

The ship rocked and lurched beneath Johnny. He lost his balance and had to grip the safety railing along the outer side of the corridor. He had nine seconds!

 

Johnny let out a yell and charged up the remaining length of the hall, fighting with his balance as the ship swayed beneath him. He reached the open hatch and wasted no time chucking the key card out into the open air.

 

Taeyong tilted the ship backwards and entered a rather risky, almost entirely vertical climb, thrusters at max. Even in such a short amount of time, Taeyong had gotten the ship quite a ways above the roofs of the residential district.

 

Three.

 

Two.

 

One.

 

There was a spark of an explosion. Night briefly turned into day as the key card detonated in mid-air. Johnny held his hand over his eyes to keep the brightness of the blast out of them. He could feel the heat of the fire on his skin even from such a distance.

 

Fuck. An explosion of that size would have killed them all.

 

Taeyong’s voice came over the ship’s intercom. “Detonation confirmed. No casualties. Crew meeting on the bridge. Now.”

 

The hatch Johnny was standing in front of began to close without warning. He had to leap backwards to keep his hands or legs from getting caught in the winding, twisting machinery. Heaving a sigh of relief, he made his way to the bridge.

 

By the time he arrived in the pilot’s cab, the rest of the crew was already gathered.

 

Ten sat slouched in the corner, picking at his nails out of nervous habit. Taeyong sat at the controls, leveling them out now that the danger had passed. Jungwoo leaned against the far wall, reattaching his robot arm and running a quick calibration test on the fingers and other joints. Sicheng sat on the armrest of Taeyong’s pilot seat, looking more shook up than anyone else.

 

“Taeyong,” Johnny said firmly, trying yet again to be a proper captain. “What’s Yukhei’s status?”

 

“I’ve pinpointed his location. He’s down by the harbor but he’s surrounded by Samurai forces.”

 

“Prepare for extraction,” Johnny stated.

 

Sicheng’s expression twisted with disbelief. “We aren’t leaving him behind?”

 

“He’s a member of our crew,” Johnny said. It was every man for himself in prison. On the outside, though, they worked as a team. “We don’t leave a crew member behind.”

 

Taeyong glanced over his shoulder at Johnny, mildly surprised.

 

“Sicheng, I’m leaving his retrieval up to you.” Johnny stepped towards the center of the cab, slowly but surely easing himself back into his role as captain. “We’re outnumbered so fighting is not our priority. We locate Yukhei, swoop down and grab him and fly out.”

 

“Where are we going,” Taeyong asked seriously. “The job was a bust. What are we going to do?”

 

“The Samurai will come for our heads. Or try to.” Johnny stretched an arm above his head until the vertebrae in his neck popped delightfully. “And I’m an escaped prisoner so I can’t exactly walk around the city and line up new jobs. We go for the ocean.”

 

A long moment of silence before the news really settled over them. “International waters,” Jungwoo declared.

 

“The one place neither the Samurai nor the cops have jurisdiction,” Sicheng confirmed.

 

Ten looked up from his fingernail-picking. “What’s all that mean?”

 

“Over the ocean’s our only safe hiding spot,” Taeyong said. A grin slowly inched across his face. “We’ll have to rob other ships for supplies.”

 

“And make stops at exotic ports of call along our travels,” Jungwoo chimed in, “always watching our backs, trying not to get caught.”

 

“It’ll be like old times,” Sicheng said with a grin.

 

Johnny smiled. The crew had been back together for a day but it wasn’t until this moment that the _crew_ was back together. “Let’s go get Yukhei,” he said. Then, like an afterthought, he added, “Has anyone seen my hat?”

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

Guanheng got back to his apartment with no other incident.

 

With his shelves and fridge stocked, he hovered over his stove, boiling water for his ramen.

 

Not exactly the best of meals, but he had other things to spend his money on. Food was something he could spend the bare minimum on and still get by okay.

 

A simple but happy life was all Guanheng could hope for.

 

Sure, he could jack into the net and waste time gambling or absorbing porn. He could buy into an automated system that could deliver his whole grocery list directly to his pantry. Get a machine to precisely construct all of his meals. But he hated having his entire existence be nothing but 0s and 1s in the data cloud.

 

That’s why he liked to walk. Visit his friends’ houses instead of sending them chat messages and pings on their optic implants. He liked to use his own two hands to make meals and he still preferred the feel and smell of paper money to digital currency.

 

It was probably a weird and contradictory philosophy coming from a guy who still had an augmented eye, an augmented hand. But he’d made everything he wore. From his eyeball to his implants, he’d made them. Even the bank account he bought things with was attached to someone else’s identity. He had to do everything he could to stay directly off of the net, out of the log books and checkpoints or any of the other numerous ways the government could track its people. That meant using parts with no serial numbers. Physically plugging into whatever he wanted to hack or interface with.

 

An inconvenience, sure, but the few extra seconds didn’t mean too much in the long run.

 

Just like most other people in the city, Guanheng was trying to hide.

 

He was on the run. Trying to keep two steps ahead of the pirates who wanted his ass dead.

 

He’d laid low for two years.

 

Laying low for the rest of his life really didn’t feel like that much longer.

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

Yukhei had been lying about coming after the Samurai with an entire pirate fleet.

 

Johnny still only had the one ship but Jeno didn’t need to know that. Jeno just needed to be afraid. Paranoid. He just needed to _think_ a threat was out there.

 

“It’s gonna take me forever to walk all the way back,” Yukhei groaned in frustration. He flicked his eyes to the left and waved a hand near his eye but the motion command did not activate his eye. It must have been on the fritz again. Gotten temporarily disconnected. Any of the other myriad of things that could happen when you got your implants inserted in some rip-off doctor’s rooftop shed. “Fuck. I need to tell them about the bomb.” He tried the motion control again. Nothing.

 

Was the battery dead? Or was there some dirt or other debris on the connection?

 

Yukhei was tempted to just pop his eyeball out and check but a rush of footsteps nearby made him freeze up.

 

From around every corner, men and women in crisp black suits stepped out, guns pointed towards him.

 

“Ahh shit. Ahh fuck.” Yukhei looked from face to face. Their thick, black tattoos were visible even from a distance, creeping up over the collars of their blazers.

 

Samurai.

 

Jeno came out of the alley behind him.

 

Shit shit shit. Yukhei reversed his grip on the knife in his hand and threatened to lunge in Jeno’s direction with it.

 

“I wouldn’t do that,” the Samurai heir said. He didn’t break his confident stride. “You’ll be riddled full of bullets before you’ll even get close.”

 

It was the ridiculous truth.

 

“Drop it. You’re surrounded, fool.”

 

Yukhei wiggled his fingers. The motion command demagnetized his palm and the knife fell to the pavement with a clatter. He raised his hands over his head in surrender. For fuck’s sake, he’d had more than his fair share of guns pointed at him today! “Why are you doing this to me,” he wailed in desperation. “I told you I don’t have the key.”

 

“You did,” Jeno said. He circled around Yukhei so that they could stand facing each other. “But you still fucked with the Samurai and personally humiliated me and you must be punished accordingly.”

 

Yukhei smirked. “I prefer being spanked and told I’ve been a bad boy.”

 

“God. What?” Jeno sputtered out.

 

“I wouldn’t mind being tied up and tickled, though,” Yukhei went on.

 

“Just shut up. Shut up.”

 

“I’ve always wanted to try-”

 

Jeno slapped him across the face with the handle of his pistol. “Shit!”

 

“Fuck,” Yukhei screamed. Blood leaked from his bottom lip and filled his mouth with a coppery, bitter taste. He pressed his palm to his mouth. “You’re such a dick.”

 

“And you can’t seem to realize you’re in danger.”

 

“Trust me. I’m trying to laugh away the panic. What were we talking about? Punishments? Do you have a pair of handcuffs on you?”

 

“The only punishment you’re getting is a bullet through the head.” Jeno raised his gun and pressed it to Yukhei’s temple.

 

Yukhei laughed but there was no humor in it. He’d always lived knowing that something like this would happen. That he’d get caught in a scam. Piss off the wrong people. Wind up pumped full of lead. The day had just come sooner than he’d ever guessed. He looked at Jeno. “I’m genuinely attracted to you, I hope you know.”

 

“I could care less.” Jeno let him down easy.

 

“I genuinely want you to tie me up and use me.”

 

Jeno made his voice soft and sentimental. “I’ll hang your corpse from the wing of Johnny’s ship. Use you as a message. Is that close enough?”

 

Yukhei shut his eyes and waited. “It’ll have to be.” Way too late, his optical implant lit up, filling the darkness behind his eyelids with chat messages from Sicheng, screaming at him in every language they shared and even one or two they didn’t. As Yukhei stood there awaiting death, a brand new message popped into the chat. Sicheng had posted in Chinese, _we’re coming to get your ass_ . Easy enough to understand but what did the _watch your head_ part mean?

 

He heard the low rumble of a ship engine above his head.

 

The rest came by instinct. He opened his eyes and threw himself to the ground just as Johnny’s ship flew through the air above the street.

 

There was a long rope hanging from the open hatch of the cargo bay. Sicheng was grabbing hold of the end of it, flying through the air at great speed. Sicheng kicked out a leg as he flew past. His ankle caught Jeno in the throat, sending the Samurai heir to the asphalt, choking and gasping for air.

 

“Come on,” Sicheng yelled at Yukhei. “We can’t circle back.”

 

That’s all Yukhei needed to know. He got to his feet and took off running, chasing after Sicheng’s outstretched hand.

 

Jeno caught his breath. “What are you waiting for you fucking bastards. Shoot the ship out of the air!”

 

His command was immediately obeyed. All of the Samurai members trained their pistols and SMGs at the flying ship’s hull and unloaded their ammunition in a shower of sparks not too different from fireworks.

 

“Get your ass moving,” Sicheng warned. “We’ll be at the harbor edge in less than a block!”

 

Yukhei picked up speed, eventually keeping pace and then running faster than the airship above his head. He caught up with Sicheng. Made a leap through the air.

 

Sicheng caught his hand, grunting with effort from the weight. “Goddamn, man, lose some weight.”

 

“It’s all muscle,” Yukhei made sure he knew. He used Sicheng’s clothes as handholds and pulled himself up and up until he could grip the rope with his own hands. “That key card we snatched-”

 

“-was a bomb,” Sicheng finished his sentence. “We obviously figured that out.”

 

“Thank God,” Yukhei shouted over the rush of the wind in his ears. “I was worried.”

 

“About me? I sure as hell hope not. Shit, man. You're bleeding like a stuck pig. Ten,” Sicheng yelled into his comm device. “We’re clear. Open fire.”

 

Not even an instant later, the ship’s cannon fired. Louder than thunder. An explosion on the ground seemed to rip the air apart. Yukhei didn’t know why, but he searched the crowd of Samurai below him until he spotted Jeno’s narrow frame, cast into complete silhouette by the fire raging behind him. He felt relieved.

 

The ship’s cannon fired again. Swamping another section of the street below in fire and shrapnel. The smoke thickened and blocked Yukhei’s view. He squinted against the wind, wishing he had a thermal scanner on his optical implant.

 

It wasn’t until the ship was flying over the ocean that Yukhei realized why he was still staring into the smoke.

 

He didn’t know why he was hoping Jeno survived the blast.

 

🃁🃎🃍🃋🃊

 

Donghyuck rushed into the old warehouse that sat on the far edge of the harbor, slamming the service entry door behind him.

 

Regardless of the late hour, he didn’t care about disturbing anyone. Sleep was a privilege, not a right.

 

He was dead tired from that night’s misadventures, but he’d scored big and Mark would surely praise him! He rushed up the metal stairs to the second floor.

 

Mark was stretched out on the couch, asleep, but Donghyuck unceremoniously slapped him across the face with the feathery yet somehow still furry thing that he was holding. Mark didn’t actually wake up until the third slap. He woke up groggily, muttering curses and making an inaccurate grab for the gun holstered on his thigh.

 

“It’s me,” Donghyuck announced himself.

 

Mark recognized his voice and flopped back onto the couch as if to go back to sleep.

 

“Look what I found,” Donghyuck exclaimed, his entire face lit up with excitement. He shook the dead Screech in his hand, enjoying the rattle of its snapped neck in his grip. “Think you can cook this up for me? I’ll even share.”

 

Still zombie-like in his lack of consciousness, Mark sat up and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “Wait. Did you smack me in the face with that thing?”

 

“Exactamundo,” Donghyuck informed him.

 

Mark gagged.

 

“You’re the best chef I know. Roast this up.” He kicked Mark’s legs aside so that he could flop down on the couch next to the man.

 

“What’s that,” Mark moaned, pointing to Donghyuck’s other hand.

 

“Oh, this old thing?” Donghyuck held up the object in his hand. It was thin and rectaculangular, sporting an all-black design. “Some kind of credit card, I think?”

 

“You _think_?” Mark leaned forward and snatched the card out of Donghyuck’s hand. His eye flashed as his optical implant scanned it. “It’s a credit card but it serves some other function. I don’t have the software upgrades to tell what exactly. Where did you find this?”

 

“It was in the Screech’s stomach,” Donghyuck said. He pointed to the red gash along the thing’s underbelly where he’d performed impromptu surgery. “It had eaten something of mine but I guess it dissolved over the course of the night. I’m roasting it over a fire out of revenge.”

 

“I see,” Mark said, hardly paying attention. His eyes were still on the black card. His best guess was that it also served as a key card but what it opened was beyond his implant’s capabilities. “I’ll take it to the bank in the morning,” he said, standing up. “See if there’s any cash on it. Come on, let’s go to the kitchen.”

 

He tossed the all-access key card onto the table next to the couch.

**Author's Note:**

> @[Curious Cat](https://curiouscat.me/TheSwingbyJHF)


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